Walk back through the prompts you sent
Press the up arrow in the composer to put the prompt you sent before back in it. Press it again for the one before that, and down to come forward again. The walk is this tab's own prompts, the way a shell walks its history.
Why you would use it
You want to send a prompt again with one word changed, or you want to see how you worded the instruction two turns ago. With a keyboard that is two presses, rather than scrolling the transcript to find the message and tapping its pencil.
How to use it
Put the caret in the composer (
#draft).
Press ↑. The last prompt you sent in this tab is in the box, with the caret at its end.
Press ↑ again for older prompts, ↓ for newer ones.
Press ↓ past the newest and the half-written message you started from comes back.
Edit and send as usual. Sending starts the walk over.
What you see
The box fills with the prompt and grows to fit it; the send button lights as it does for anything typed. Nothing else on the screen changes — the transcript does not move, and the prompt stays where it was in it.
An arrow that has nowhere to go does nothing: ↑ at the oldest prompt, ↓ before any walk has started, either one in a tab that has sent nothing.
Limits and known gaps
- Arrow keys only, so in practice this is a desktop feature. A phone with a hardware keyboard gets it too.
- The arrows still move the caret while there is a line to move to. In a multi-line draft only ↑ on the first line and ↓ on the last walk the history; anything with a selection never does.
- Lines are counted by the newlines you typed, not by how the box wraps them. A long message with no newline in it is one line however many rows it fills, so ↑ in the middle of it walks the history rather than moving up a row. ↓ brings the message straight back.
- The history is per tab, and it is what the transcript holds: prompts sent from
another device are in it, and a tab's history is gone when its context is
cleared with
/clear. - A prompt sent twice in a row is one entry.
- While the slash menu is open the arrows are the menu's — they walk its rows. Escape closes it and hands them back. In Shell mode there is no walk at all: the shell has its own history. A focused pane with no tab in it has none either.
- The list is taken at the press that starts the walk. A prompt that lands while you are walking — a queued message going out, or another device — joins the history at the next walk, not this one.
- An edit made to a recalled prompt is kept while you walk on and is handed back when you walk past it again, but it is dropped when the tab changes or the message is sent.
Related
- send-a-message — the box itself
- manage-queued-messages — the pencil that edits a message still in the queue
- drafts-kept-per-tab — why the walk is dropped when the tab changes
- hold-backspace-to-delete-words — the other key the box treats specially
- clear-the-context — what
/cleardoes to the history - alt-moves-a-word — what the arrows do with Alt held
- clear-the-message-box — Escape twice ends the walk and empties the box